Confusing Old Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes people ask me how I can be both a Catholic and a scientist, particularly a scientist who, at least for some research, studies evolution. I tell them that they are confusing us with Evangelicals. Catholics don't have anything against evolution. A literal interpretation of the Bible, the kind that says that the earth is six thousand years old, has never been a part of our religion, at least not since the Saint Augustine warned against preaching idiocy to Pagans in 415 AD. He said that if you tell people that they have to believe in things that they know are not true and that do not matter then they will never believe you when you tell them things that are true and that do matter, things about Christ and the resurrection. The Church's friendliness towards science is not to protect science. It is to protect Christianity. — Gina DeMarco

The old life is gone, my days are new,
but time is still a mystery
of wishes, and this sad, confusing fragrance.
- Rosa — Margarita Engle

Why don't you wear those tiny shorts when you run, like they do in the movies?" His voice was low and sexy, and he knew it.
"Because I'm not in a movie. I know it's confusing, since you obviously live 'The Saxon Show' day and night, but some of us want to live a boring, old, normal high school life, you know? — Liz Reinhardt

They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men - some in their brushed Confederate uniforms - on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years. — William Faulkner

The displacement of class politics by identity politics has been very confusing to older Marxists, who for many years clung to the old industrial working class as their preferred category of the underprivileged. They tried to explain this shift in terms of what Ernest Gellner labeled the "Wrong Address Theory": "Just as extreme Shi'ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations. — Francis Fukuyama

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Robert bowed to the inevitable. The queen's motto, 'I see all and speak nothing. was as well chosen as any motto could be. He had almost made his old mistake of confusing what Elizabeth said with what she would do. — Jeane Westin

[...] confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever touches. — William Faulkner

How confusing the beams from memory's lamp are; One day a bachelor, the next a grampa. What is the secret of the trick? How did I get so old so quick? — Ogden Nash

I'm mad because girls as young as eight years old are being shamed about their bodies. Fifth graders go on diets and admire Instagram pics of celebs in waist trainers. Some of the people I'm closest to have struggled with eating disorders. I'm mad at an industry that suggests that painfully thin is the only acceptable way to be. Please don't get on me for skinny shaming. If that's how you are shaped, God bless, but we gotta mix it up, because it's upsetting and confusing to women with other body types. — Amy Schumer

Journalists aren't supposed to praise things. It's a violation of work rules almost as serious as buying drinks with our own money or absolving the CIA of something. — P. J. O'Rourke

Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren't. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. — Ursula K. Le Guin

From my childhood, I remember a tiny old woman named Mary, made pale and almost translucent by time. Mary's childhood memories extended back to the confusing and violent finale of the Civil War, and she told stories of brutal murders in those days and refused to name some of the killers, as if dead men might still be prosecuted in the late 1950s. — Charles Frazier

Sentences aren't. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man: I am not even young. Just about the time they finally started inventing women, I started getting old. And I went right on doing it. Shamelessly. I have allowed myself to get old and haven't done one single thing about it, with a gun or anything. What — Ursula K. Le Guin

She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible
and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary
fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood. — Vladimir Nabokov

Democrats are liberals, and - to their profound embarrassment - liberalism is an old, white European male political philosophy. Liberalism is based on the thought of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and - oh, the shame of it - slave-owning, woman-exploiting Thomas Jefferson. Liberalism is deeply confusing to liberals. America's first great liberal populist was Andrew Jackson, perpetrator of the genocidal Trail of Tears and annihilator of the Second Bank of the United States and hence of centralized economic control. (Sadly, Jackson put an end to the Second Bank of the United States before Hillary Clinton had a chance to claim large lecture fees for speaking to its executives.) Plus, liberalism is painfully unhip. Say "Great Society" to today's with-it young Democratic voters and they hear air quotes around the "Great." LBJ — P. J. O'Rourke

It's confusing when people who do not know me say they miss the old me. You know me merely through the lyrics I write and the pictures I've been in. There is no old or new Hayley. There is however an older Hayley. I'm 25 now. Good on me for living through all these years with a million people's judging eyes all over me and thinking they know me better. — Hayley Williams

He knew she drank coffee, but he knew nothing about the stuff himself, and he intentionally hung back watching other people order for a while. When he heard a young woman who clearly couldn't be old enough to drink coffee order a grande, iced, half-caf, triple-mocha latte macchiato, he panicked, but he was committed. It was all very confusing, and by the time he was at the counter, he was ready to give up and buy her a coffeemaker. — Elizabeth Finn

The healers' university looked exactly as Tessia had imagined. Her father had described it as an 'old but strange building that has adopted and absorbed surrounding houses as opportunity and funds allowed'. It sounded confusing and intriguing, and it was. — Trudi Canavan

The average age of a model is fifteen years old. It's so crazy to me. And how confusing for men; they're like, "Well, I'm supposed to be attracted to that image" - like that's what it's designed for - "but it's a fifteen year old girl." I think it's a very confusing thing for every single person involved. — Laura Benanti

I stare at the houses, each of them immaculate and manicured to the point of irritation. It makes me want to shoot a gun into the air, just to see all the quiet people inside scramble out. This neighborhood needs a little life breathed into it. — Colleen Hoover

How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks. — Marcus Aurelius

Positive thoughts, positive life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I'm - I'm Marjorie, a fourteen-year-old girl, scared of everything, who doesn't know why she hears voices that tell her confusing things. And I try to be good and I try. Try not to listen to them.
Are you scared and confused like I am? I think everyone is secretly like me. — Paul Tremblay

When I was a wee little kid," remarked Roic, watching over their shoulders, "there was a time I thought that any skinny old man I saw was my grandfather. It was pretty confusing. — Lois McMaster Bujold